2D Animation Software Guide 2020

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2D Animation Glossary – A What’s This and What’s That

Every industry or hobby has its own “language” or every day jargon, that, to beginners or the
uninitiated can seem like a whole load of gobbledegook. And 2d animation is no different.

However, don’t be put off by this. It’s really not that hard, and if you have any lm, photography or
art experience you may have come across a lot of them already since, let’s be honest, 2d
animation is really lm production through another medium.

Anyway to help you in your quest to become a better 2d animator I’ve made a go-to list or
glossary of as many of the key phrases, concepts and principles that I could think of that relate to
2d animation and it’s production. I’ve included a number of “technical” terms that are important
in understanding the various features found in the 2d animation software programs that are out
there, as well as some timeless concepts that every animator should become familiar with, 2d or
3d.

If you feel there’s anything I’ve missed out, feel free to add a comment at the end and I’ll get it
added asap.

Oh yeah, and they’re in alphabetical order for ease of access.

2D Animation Glossary

2d

2-Dimensional, and refers to any image that is created in only two dimensions or axes (X and Y),
e.g. a character drawn on a piece of paper like Disney’s Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs.

3d

3-Dimensional, and refers to any image that is created in three dimensions or axes (X, Y and Z),
e.g. a character modelled in clay like Nick Park’s Wallace and Gromit.

3D camera

Similar to the multiplane camera but works in a true 3 dimensional environment. So you can
create a camera move in a 3d software package like Maya or 3D Studio Max and export that
camera to be used in a 2d animation program – effectively allowing you to combine 3d and 2d
elements easily. A 3D camera tool is usually only available in the high-end 2d software packages.

Animation layers

The separation of an animated character or characters into separate layers to speed up work ow
and ef ciency and save a lot of redrawing. For example, let’s say you have a character that is
standing still and eating. Now, you could re-draw the entire character every frame while you are
animating the mouth, but a quicker way is to draw once the body and other parts that aren’t
moving, and then on a separate layer or piece of paper, do the animation of the mouth. Some of
the old Saturday morning cartoons were masterpieces of using layers, even down to moving just
the eyes or an eyebrow. Digital animation programs make the use of layers even easier.

Animation path

A path that can be plotted out and which you set your character or object to follow. An easy way
to plan out the screen space your animation will cover.

Anti-aliasing
This refers to a technique which reduces or smoothes the edges of an object if it appears too
pixelated (i.e. when you are able to see the square pixels)

Bar sheet

Used by an editor to mark out dialogue and audio timing. Bar sheets are rarely used these days
since almost everything is digital and the accuracy is far superior and faster.

Blue screen

The “chroma key” techinque of lming live action actors and footage against a blue screen in
order to remove the blue and replace it with a different background.

Bones

As the name suggests bones are a tool found in various software programs that allow you to
create an internal “skeleton” to a character so that you can move limbs and various body parts
independently. Sometimes they are also known as “joints”. Mostly used in Flash style cut-out
animation they were rst developed for 3d animation software to simulate the armatures that
are used in stop motion animation.

Bouncing ball

Where every beginning animator starts, the bouncing ball is the best exercise for learning timing,
spacing, volume, character and squash and stretch. Even animators with 20 years experience
come back to this exercise. Master this and you’re an animator.

Breaking joints
The animation technique where you make a character’s limb “break” – turn it in the wrong
direction – usually for 1 or 2 frames in order to accentuate an action and give it more impact.
Used more for cartoony style animation.

Cel

Short for “celluloid”, a cel is a transparent sheet or piece of lm that is used to trace nal drawings
in traditional animation. The cel is laid over the nal drawing, which is then inked or Xeroxed
(photocopied), painted and photographed. The transparent nature of the cel means that you can
build up multiple layers of characters or objects on separate cels and still see the background.
Although the number of layers was often limited since each cel has very slight tint, meaning that
many layers results in a slight opacity and change in colour (the painting department would often
take this into account and have a tiny variation for a character’s colour depending on whether the
layer was at the top or bottom of the stack, in order to keep colour consistency throughout the
movie).

Cel use has declined signi cantly with the rise of digital animation programs which make the
process redundant as you can draw directly in the program itself, or scan in your drawings to be
inked and painted, with perfect transparency on unlimited numbers of layers.

Chroma Key

The special effects technique of compositing two or more images together based on their colour
hues or chroma range. Most commonly known as “blue screen” or “green screen”, it involves the
removal of the blue or green background (or any other designated colour) and compositing it
together with another image.

Clean up

As the name suggests this is the process of “cleaning up” rough drawings to make the lines
cleaner and get them ready to be coloured or painted. Not just a tracing exercise,  the clean up
artist (or process if done by the animator themself) is also checking the quality of the drawing and
making sure it is not “off-model” – in other words the character maintains correct volume,
proportion, and design throughout. In digital animation software the clean up process is
especially important if you are looking to use the paint and ll functions as the tool will look for
solid shapes with closed lines. Any gaps will result in colour seeping into other unwanted areas.
Some advanced programs have auto clean up functions when you scan your drawings but their
effectiveness is debatable. I’m always wary of anything that says “auto”

Dope sheet

See “exposure sheet”

Drawing tablet

Also known as a graphics tablet or “digitizer”, the modern drawing tablet has begun to take the
place of the traditional light box for 2d animation production, as it allows the animator to draw
directly into the animation software for a totally paperless production. They come in a variety of
sizes, styles and prices, as well as with and without a screen.

Check out our list of good cheap drawing tablets as well as the top drawing tablets with a screen.

Exposure sheet

An exposure sheet (also known variously as “dope sheet”, “camera instruction sheet”, or “X-
sheet”) is a sheet of paper used primarily in traditional animation to mark out the timing of
various actions and dialogue. A typical exposure sheet runs vertically from top to bottom and
split into a rectangular grid, where each rectangle represents one frame, and every eight frames
is marked by a thick line (representing half a foot of lm). 3 of these sections equals 1 second of
lm (8 x 3 = 24 frames). There are usually separate columns for notes, camera instructions,
dialogue, and animation layers.

You can download some free exposure sheet templates here

Field Chart
A eld chart is basically a grid designed to split the screen space or camera view into small
squares or “ elds”. Field charts come in 12 elds (12f) or 15 elds (15f) sizes. No longer used as
widely in the digital age as before, these were (and still are) invaluable to traditional animators
working on paper as they can plot the exact place they want their character to be on screen by
using a transparent eld chart overlaid on their paper. Most software programs come with eld
chart functions and will often go further, showing you “action safe” and “title safe” areas.

Field Of View (FOV)

The amount of the observable world or environment that can be seen through the camera at any
one moment.

FK (Forward Kinematics)

An animation system where each joint in a chain has to be animated individually and depends
wholly on the position of the parent joint.

Flash style / Flash animation

Although this used to mean any animation produced in the program Flash from Adobe, it now
refers to any 2d animation that is produced digitally that involves the manipulation of a cut-out
style character where keyframes are set and the computer can interpolate the inbetweens. In
other words, instead of drawing every frame the animator designs a character with separate
moving parts that can be animated independently of the whole.

Flip drawings

Flipping drawings is the act of literally ipping through a series of drawings (or frames) to get a
rough idea of how they will look when played back properly after being lmed (much like when
you made a little ip book as a kid). Flipping can be done with all ve ngers of the non-drawing
hand while on the light table, or with the thumb as you would when you ick through a book. Old-
school traditional animators were said to be able to ip so accurately that they rarely needed to
check the accuracy with a camera, since in those days lm was very expensive and a pencil test
could be very time consuming. However, with digital 2d animation the “art” of ipping is dying off
as now all you need to do is press “Play” on the computer and you get an instant accurate ip.

Here’s Disney great Glen Keane ipping a scene from “Aladdin”:

Footage

A measurement of the amount of animation or lm produced. It comes from the old days where
the lm negative itself was measured in feet, with 16 frames to each foot. So, 10 feet of lm
would be 160 frames.

FPS (Frames per second)

This is the rate or speed at which the frames in a sequence are played back. Just to confuse things
further, these rates vary depending on country and medium. The universal standard for lm is 24
fps (although some experimentation is going on now at 60 fps for HD and 3D movies, most
notably “The Hobbit” lms from Peter Jackson). Video is 25 fps for PAL (UK and Europe), and
29.97 fps for NTSC (US and Canada).

 
Frames

A frame is a single image of screen time, and multiple frames when played one after the other
give the illusion of movement, due to Persistence of Vision (POV). This is how lm works, and was
really developed in the 19th century by the photographer Eadweard Muybridge. Most lm runs
at 24 frames per second (FPS).

Green screen

The “chroma key” techinque of lming live action actors and footage against a green screen in
order to remove the green and replace it with a different background.

IK (Inverse Kinematics)

An animation system that allows a chain of multiple joints to be moved by using only one effector
or control. An example is a character with an IK leg – you only need to move the foot control and
the lower and upper leg joints will move automatically with the knee position being worked out
mathematically.

Inbetweens

These are the drawings “in between” the key poses. In the old days inbetweens were usually done
by the assistant animator or “inbetweener”, and the key poses were drawn the animator or lead
animator. People often make the mistake of thinking that inbetweening is an easy job, but it takes
a lot of skill and animation knowledge to do it well, since “the magic happens between the
frames” as they say. That’s why it’s important to not let the computer do all your inbetweens for
you as the computer doesn’t know how to animate, it just does think mathatically – it’s not an
artist.

Key poses

Key poses are the most important drawings or frames in a scene and are therefore done rst.
They are often the storytelling poses or most interesting or dramatic, but are also very important
when doing highly complex or dif cult scenes where a character needs to be in a certain position
at certain points in time, or when doing lip-sync to get the intonation and points of emphasis.
Used in the pose-to-pose animation technique they help the animator to “construct” the scene
quickly and show the director an idea in rough form. It also makes it easier to pass on to an
inbetweener to ll in the gaps and move the scene forward.

Keyframes

although they seem the same as key poses, keyframes actually refer to any frames or poses that
you make in a software program. Since software programs often interpolate the animation
between frames, the keyframes are the frames and poses that you actually create and save, and
which the computer then interpolates between (tweening). They are often marked on a timeline.

Light Table

A light table is any kind of desk with a semi transparent pane of glass or plastic and a light source
underneath, used mostly in traditional hand drawn animation on paper or cel. The light is there to
make tracing through several sheets of paper easier. Most animators’ light tables have an
adjustable top which can raised at an angle to make drawing easier. The central disk which is
usually made of frosted perspex is rotatable and often has a small hole at top and bottom to make
rotation easier. The pegbar is either tted to the disk manually or comes with it already xed in
place on more expensive models.

These days many 2d animators and artists use lightweight thin light boxes and pads for tracing
their drawings. They take up much less space, are cheaper and very portable.

Line test

A line test or pencil test is a series of drawings that have been captured via camera, scanner or
other input device and then played back in order to get an accurate idea of the timing and look of
the animation. As the name suggests they are usually line drawings before being coloured or
painted.
Here’s a pencil test of one of my favourite scenes by my all-time favourite animator Bill Tytla:

Lip sync

Lip sync is the process of synchronising your animation to a piece of dialogue – literally
synchronising the lips. The traditional process involved using a chinagraph pencil to mark the
timing and points of emphasis on an audio track, and then using a bar sheet to mark out those
points in frames. The bar sheet information was then transferred to exposure sheets (X-sheets).
X-sheets are still used but are now usually in digital format within the software itself, and the
audio track is also digitized in a wave format making it much easier and more accurate to
synchronise your audio. Some animation programs on the market also even have “auto lip-sync”
functions, though the accuracy of them varies.

Mask

A mask or matte is shape that is used to cover up certain areas of an image using in live action or
real photography. For instance, let’s say you want to have a character walking behind a tree. You
simply create a mask or matte object in the shape of the tree and then put it on a layer above the
character, so that when he walks it looks like he walks behind the tree.

 
Multiplane camera

The multiplane camera is a camera that is mounted on top of a large number of “planes” or layers
which allows you to create a realistic sense of depth of eld (DOF) in a 2d animation, due to the
distance between the layers and cameras. This distance creates parallax which adds to the 3-
dimensionality of the nal image. It was invented at the Walt Disney company in the 1930s and
used to great effect in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Many of the professional level 2d
animation software programs these days have a multiplane camera function allowing you to get
the same effect without needing a huge warehouse and expensive piece of engineering.

Onion skinning

A feature in animation software that allows you to see a certain number of frames before and
after your current one, so that you can see the arcs and spacing better. You are usually able to
manually set the number of before and after frames as well as the opacity of them. It is
sometimes also called “ghosting”. It mimics the way an animator sees drawings on a lightbox.

Parallax

The difference in the apparent distance or speed between objects. This is why objects far away
look as though they are moving slower than those closer to the viewer, even though they may in
reality be moving signi catly faster. For example, an aeroplane in the sky seen from the ground
looks like it is not moving as fast as it is, simply because the distance it needs to cover in order to
cross the viewer’s eld of view is much greater than say a person who is walking right in from of
them.

Particles

A particle system is a software that uses algorithms and computer simulations to mimic real
world phenomena such as water, smoke, explosions, re, etc. Many high end 2d animation
programs now come with a built-in particle system allowing you to generate these types of
effects in your work.

 
Pegbar

A small strip of plastic or metal with a few pins or pegs sticking out, to which an animator xes
their paper, and helps to keep each frame or drawing in the same position. Many 2d programs
come with automatic peg bar detection when scanning to make the line up of the drawings as
accurately as possible when they are scanned. A workaround to this is just to stick your pegbar to
your scanner and scan your drawings like that.

Pencil test

See “Line test”

Persistence of Vision (POV)

Not to be confused with Point Of View, this is the phenomenon where the human eye retains an
image for a fraction of a second after it has disappeared, so when we see a sequence of images
played one after another at a certain speed we have the illusion of movement. It is said that this is
what makes lm or any moving image possible.

Pose-to-pose

An animation technique where you draw the key poses of a scene rst and then ll in the gaps or
inbetweens. This is a more methodical approach to animating where you “construct” the
framework of the scene and build it up in layers.

12 Principles (of Animation)

Compiled by Disney animators (most notably Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston), these are the 12
most important rules or guidelines that make an animation look realistic or appealing. Combining
basic physics as well as draughtmanship, art and acting these 12 principles of animation are the
bedrock for any good animator. The 12 principles are:

1. Squash and Stretch

Raster

In contrast to vector animation, a raster system relies on xed pixel information which means
that you can only scale a image down without loss of quality. Scaling an image up creates a blocky
low quality image as the pixels become more and more visible.

Rotoscope

This is the process of manually tracing over live-action footage to achieve a realistic but artistic
look to an animation. A memorable example of rotoscoping is the music video for A-Ha’s “Take On
Me” back in 1985. However, it was in heavy use much earlier than that, notably in many of the
productions by the Fleischer company in the 1930s and 1940s, and also, in a limited way, in some
of the early Disney movies…though there is some debate as to how much rotoscoping was
actually done by the Disney animators.
 

Stop motion

An animation technique that involves the manipulation of physical 3d objects with each frame
captured by a physical camera. Also known as clay animation or “claymation”, some notable
examples are Wallace and Gromit and Chicken Run by Aardman Studios. An excellent stop
motion animation kit for children and beginners is Hue Animation Studio.

Straight ahead

An alternative animation technique to pose-to-pose where the animator literally begins at frame
1 and starts animating each frame in chronological order one after the other until they’re
nished. Straight ahead animation lends itself very well to creative scenes and bursts of activity,
while the pose-to-pose method is more structured. While some animators have a preferred
method most will use both or a combination of the two throughout their work. Stop motion
animators who come to 2d will often instinctively work straight ahead as stop motion is purely
linear (you can only animate straight ahead) so that is what they’re used to. The more
experienced you are at animation the easier it is on the whole to do straight ahead animation.

Timeline

In a software program the timeline is a long bar or strip that shows a sequence’s frame range
(start and end frames) and current frame. It can also be set to show your keyframes. Timelines
usually run horizontally along the bottom of the screen, but can also be set to run vertically on
the left or right.

 
Tradigital

A made up word, combining “traditional” and “digital”. It refers to the new way of doing
traditional drawn animation by combining it or producing it entirely within the computer itself.

Tweening

A feature in digital animation programs that interpolates between keyframes. See “Inbetweens”
for a fuller description.

Vector

Vector animation is a system whereby the image information is stored in vectors instead of pixels
(raster), which means that it can be scaled up or down without any loss of quality, since the vector
values can be recalculated on the y.

Read our article explaining the differences between vector vs raster vs bitmaps here.

X-sheet

See “exposure sheet”

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